This is a blog detailing the creation/evolution/ID controversy and assorted palaeontological news. I will post news here with running commentary.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Darwin = Hitler?

A new special from Coral Ridge Ministries will air on August 26 and 27 titled Darwin's Deadly Legacy. Check for local listings. Christian NewsWire reports on this:

The program features 14 scholars, scientists, and authors who outline the grim consequences of Darwin's theory of evolution and show how this theory fueled Hitler's ovens.

"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," says Dr. Kennedy, the host of Darwin's Deadly Legacy. "Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."

It strikes me that people promoting this argument are very poor students of history. Hitler was one in a long line of despotic dictators who have practiced genocide. Stalin, Hitler's contemporary, starved 22 million people to death and yet subscribed to Lysenkoism, the antithesis of Darwinism.

Dr. Kennedy also makes a logical error when he says:

"The time has come to recognize that evolution is a bad idea and should be, frankly, discarded into the dustbin of history".

This argument is largely academic in the same way that arguments against nuclear power are. In the 1970s and 1980s, people protested against the use of nuclear power and the evils that it created. That didn't change the reality of nuclear power, which existed independently of the protestors. The same is true of evolution. Just because you do not like something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or will go away.

Thanks for the explication. What is often not talked about is the fact that the early eugenics movements that led to Nazism were based on an acceptance of the "Great Chain of Being" concept and fixity of species.